ATLANTA (AP) — A judge has rejected an attempt by the state of Georgia and a local development agency to force people who unsuccessfully sued to block an electric vehicle plant to pay the government's legal fees.
State government and the development authority demanded that six Morgan County property owners who challenged the zoning for Rivian Automotive pay more than $337,000 in legal fees incurred by the government.
Morgan County Superior Court Judge Stephen Bradley, in a ruling filed Friday, said
that the two lawsuits where the government agencies were seeking fees were far from frivolous, and that awarding legal fees to the government could make it harder for regular citizens to exercise their rights to challenge government actions in court.
“No truly aggrieved citizen should be prohibited from suing to test the legality or constitutionality of the government’s claims, and any precedent that could allow political actions and costs to be offloaded to complaining litigants would be untenable," Bradley wrote.
JoEllen Artz, a leader of opposition group No2Rivian, said the ruling keeps citizens from being “silenced by Goliath.”
The state is seeking to recover another $200,000 in fees in a separate case in Atlanta. A spokesperson for Attorney General Chris Carr didn't immediately return an email seeking comment.
The ruling came days before a Tuesday groundbreaking ceremony for the $5 billion Rivian plant, which is supposed to eventually employ 7,500 people on a 2,000-acre site near Social Circle, about 45 miles (70 kilometers) east of downtown Atlanta.
Some local residents oppose the plant, saying it is an inappropriate neighbor to farms and will ruin residents' drinking-water well in a rural area on the eastern edge of Atlanta's suburban frontier. The property's previous owner, a joint development authority that includes the governments of Jasper, Morgan, Newton and Walton counties, transferred ownership of the land to the state. That extinguished what could have been a contentious rezoning fight because state land is generally exempt from local zoning laws.
But the lawsuits challenged whether that was appropriate, questioning whether leasing land to Rivian for a truck assembly plant was a public purpose, or whether Rivian's private activity still required rezoning by Morgan County.
Bradley ruled against the plaintiffs, but he acknowledged in Friday's ruling that the transfers "seem clearly designed to circumvent resistance from local voices opposing the Rivian project.”
The development authority, in a statement published in The Covington News, argued it should recoup attorney fees because the lawsuits were illegitimate attempts to "delay progress, costing taxpayers and the community.”
But Bradley said the plaintiffs did not sue in bad faith and a had chance of winning because they raised “new and unanswered questions of law” about the state's traditional immunity from being sued.
“As shown in the defendants’ reactions, there was a very real chance that a court could decide in the plaintiffs’ favor," Bradley wrote.
The Morgan County Commission, which was also sued, didn't seek attorneys' fees.
